Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

RackNine writes "Net Applications estimates that IE6 has a share of 33.8% in China, StatCounter estimates about 40.2%. Consider the fact that there are currently about 477 million Internet users in China and you get 160 to 192 million IE6 users. That is potentially more than all Internet users in Africa and the Middle East combined (187 million)."

But couldn't they be running a somewhat modern version of Firefox? I know recent versions don't run on XP, but certainly there's something more capable than IE6 that will run on XP. IE7? IE8? Opera? Chrome? Are the Chinese really so lazy as Americans that they can't be bothered to upgrade beyond the default browser?

They may just be too lazy to figure out how to activate which can be pretty complex if you're not willing to pay. Which means they may be stuck with SP1 or even worse no service pack. I can't remember if Firefox 3+ requires a service pack or not but I know a lot of applications require Windows XP SP2.

China is going through the same thing we more or less fixed about... six or seven years ago. Websites are coded to IE6 because everyone uses IE6, and everyone uses IE6 because that's the only thing that will render these websites "correctly".

Between that and the Great Firewall, China might as well be considered as having its own version of the Internet.

But do they support XP before any service packs are installed? Many software packages don't officially support XP "pure" or XP with just service pack 1. If FF needs SP2 and most of the pirate copies over there are still running "pure" or SP1 due to activation issues stopping the service packs installing then FF is not an option.

Though I think a lot of web based apps like online banking facilities use ActiveX for stuff over there (and in other countries, such as South Korea, too), which locks users into I

IIRC IE7 and IE8 won't run without SP2 or SP3 installed, which may pose a problem to those with pirate copies who can't be bothered to jump through the hoops to get them installed without a properly activated copy of XP (and are therefore running SP1 or "pure" XP).

AFAIK the only case I know of is that XP SP1 installer bans the FCKGW keys that was leaked soon after XP RTMed. Stronger detection was considered for SP2, but it was not worth it to make pirates insecure.

But couldn't they be running a somewhat modern version of Firefox? I know recent versions don't run on XP, but certainly there's something more capable than IE6 that will run on XP. IE7? IE8? Opera? Chrome? Are the Chinese really so lazy as Americans that they can't be bothered to upgrade beyond the default browser?

In short, I don't think the "alternative browser" revolution ever happened in China. About 86% still use IE, the Chinese web is built for IE. They're really in a class of their own here, compare it to say India which is another country that is big and will be ridiculously huge as everybody gets online (July estimates):

IE: 33.48%FF: 32.86%Chrome: 29.78%

It's pretty much the same with search engines, everywhere but China Google has about 90%. In China it's 65% Baidu, 31% Google. They are on the Internet in the

Banks and most e-commerce websites require ActiveX controls thanks to export bans on encryption back in the 1990s. SSL is not preferred as it was only 64 bit until a few years ago. This was also way Apple gave up on Korea a few years back, as Macs were useless due to every site that needed SSL simply required ActiveX a decade ago and most still do today.

Requiring genuine copies of XP prevents Windows Update to upgrade these users to IE 8 which is much better than IE 6 and at least considered a modern 2009/2

Well as a PC repairman I can't comment on the Chinese but I CAN comment on why there is all these "WinXP Razr1911 SP2 corp edition" with no patches...WGA. The pirates KNOW how to update without getting WGA'ed. The people they sell the boxes to? So don't have a clue. So the pirates simply disable all the updates and there ya go. The user thinks their PC is getting slower because it is getting older when in reality it is getting ever increasing piles of malware.

I once repaired a computer with no fewer than 250,000 copies of a particular virus (don't recall which) installed. With each virus.exe weighing in at 12KB, that was 3GB of virus code on the laptop (given that this was about 6 years ago, that was a substantial amount of space).

The machine was a new laptop with XP SP1 installed (so no firewall). On its first day, it was connected to a university LAN for 8 hours non-stop, while a virus was running around the network. The virus did not have code to detect an e

Friend if that laptop is more than 2 years old I would look at Tiny7. It is virus free and for shits and giggles I tested it on some 1.6Ghz Athlon boxes I had given to me and we are talking barely 128Mb on the desktop and that is with everything except AeroGlass and WinFlip. It has the full search, UAC, breadcrumbs, you name it, and the thing actually ran faster than original XP did on these old boxes.

Oh and I would note some of what gets listed as "malware" on scans of those hacked discs is actually false

Who cares? They work hard to isolate themselves from everyone else, and they have no problems with software piracy. Why should anyone else care about what crappy old software they're using? Maybe one day the great firewall will go up in smoke and they'll have access to the wider internet and realize just how far behind their browsers are. Other than that, it doesn't make a single bit of difference to me what browser they use. The only Chinese people who would be accessing my sites or servers are workin

(I can't access my Bank of China account on anything but IE; BOC requires a browser plugin for "security" that won't run on anything but IE. Guess I'll be doing all of my online banking at work, because I run Macs and Linux at the house.)

Chinese don't need anything but IE to access their internet, because their internet is damned ugly with no sense of design or aesthetics. The entire Chinese internet is like visiting MySpace. The few sites that cater to us expats usually have non-Chinese designers.

(I can't access my Bank of China account on anything but IE; BOC requires a browser plugin for "security" that won't run on anything but IE. Guess I'll be doing all of my online banking at work, because I run Macs and Linux at the house.)

Chinese don't need anything but IE to access their internet, because their internet is damned ugly with no sense of design or aesthetics. The entire Chinese internet is like visiting MySpace. The few sites that cater to us expats usually have non-Chinese designers.

ActiveX for security, yep, that's smart.

As for Chinese website design, I think it's partly linguistic. Chinese can fit a whole sales pitch on two square inches. So their websites look like lots of little boxes, all crammed together. It's a weird aesthetic. Japan has it too. Other websites (especially official ones) are just badly designed, by someone with more "connections" than skill.

As for Chinese website design, I think it's partly linguistic. Chinese can fit a whole sales pitch on two square inches. So their websites look like lots of little boxes, all crammed together. It's a weird aesthetic.

Not sure whether the Ling's Cars [lingscars.com] website is representative of the weird aesthetic you refer to, but it's a hoot nevertheless.

So their websites look like lots of little boxes, all crammed together. It's a weird aesthetic. Japan has it too.

Yes, but most of the Japanese websites I've seen definitely have a real sense of aesthetics to them. It's unique and very different from western aesthetics, of course, but just as present; it certainly doesn't look like something someone threw together with no attention to detail.

Not lazy. I bet most are probably not aware. They may also not see the need for a better browser?

You don't need to see the "need" for a better browser to want to abandon IE6. You just have to see that it's a part of a 10-year-old operating system that's no longer sold, and that the latest version of Windows, 7, comes with a much newer version of IE. It shouldn't take a genius to figure out that if you're stuck on an ancient web browser, sooner or later you're going to have some problems. And sure, XP may

Of course, one of the major reasons that the "Tomato OS" is so popular is Microsoft lockin. If you're using a MIcrosoft web server (like Bank of China does... did?) you really have to use the Microsoft browser for it to work properly but that's far too expensive for the working Chinese. Add to that the fact of the political decision to force the browser into the OS 'shell', ie explorer.exe. and Microsoft have effectively bazookered their feet.

If you're using a MIcrosoft web server (like Bank of China does... did?) you really have to use the Microsoft browser for it to work properly

When I ran Apache HTTP Server on Windows Server 2003 inside my employer's intranet, clients running Firefox on Ubuntu had no problem accessing it. Nor have I had a problem reaching public web servers running IIS from my Ubuntu laptop. I've never used IIS in any of my own deployments, but I've been told it still runs PHP applications [iis.net]. So to what extent does any popular Microsoft web server technology require Internet Explorer?

This effectively stops anyone using many alternative browsers (or IE9), and many use pirated XP (SP0) simply to run IE6 to access these sites...

You can run IIS quite easily with no alternate killing extensions, but many sites were actively encouraged to use them (everywhere in the world), in China this has not (yet) stopped and so they still have an IE6 centric Web...

It was caused by earlier versions of IIS, that were packaged with web development systems that encouraged development using ActiveX, back when they thought they could take over the internet by making propitiatory extensions to it... MS have since depreciated this and now actively discourage it... but the damage was done

As you say nothing intrinsic to IIS, but the whole package as sold (Browser/Server/Development system) was touted as a single solution and that encouraged development of systems heavily

First of all, please read the disclaimer in my/. profile. After that, if you wish to continue the discussion, let's stick to the facts. Specifically:

It was caused by earlier versions of IIS, that were packaged with web development systems that encouraged development using ActiveX

Can you give a specific example of a "web development system that encouraged development using ActiveX"? Before.NET, there was ASP, which was also strictly a server-side technology (it used ActiveScript was based on OLE Automation, which was part of ActiveX - but this has nothing in common with ActiveX use in the browser; unfortunately, a lot of people assume

If you're using a MIcrosoft web server (like Bank of China does... did?) you really have to use the Microsoft browser for it to work properly

That is BS. IIS, like any other web server, just serves whatever you tell it to serve. If you write valid standard HTML, any browser will be able to handle it, regardless of the server.

Add to that the fact of the political decision to force the browser into the OS 'shell', ie explorer.exe.

That's more BS. explorer.exe has nothing whatsoever to do with Internet Explorer - the binary for the latter is iexplore.exe. Furthermore, explorer.exe does not even load IE's rendering engine (mshtml.dll) - this is trivially checked by Process Explorer or any other similar app that shows DLLs loaded in a process.

Lots of mainland Internet users don't have access at home, but will use it in Internet cafés instead. I wouldn't be surprised if many of them are still running XP (if a computer ain't broke, don't fix it - that costs too much), with the default IE6.

Many mainlanders have connection at home or at work as well of course, yet those are used far less intensive than shared computers.

Funny you should mention that as Windows 7 is easier to pirate than XP ever was. In fact not only is Windows 7 easier to pirate ( the hacked version floating around doesn't even need a code, and has all versions from Starter to Ultimate on the disc) but if you look up "Tiny7 Rev 09" you'll find a version of Windows 7 that uses less memory than XP while keeping most of the bling except the see through taskbar. How the hell those guys did it I don't know, but I decided to give it a spin on an old off lease office box I was gonna have to wipe anyway. We're talking about a 1.6Ghz with 512Mb of old SDRAM and damned if the OS isn't fricking peppy!

As for TFA maybe someone in China can answer this next question: Is your banking tied to IE 6 like Korea? I know Korea has been stuck on IE 6 for awhile due to using ActiveX to get around the crypto export rules. Maybe China has the same problem?

Installing a pirate version of windows has never been hard (you could integrate the key with XP too). The problem is keeping it up to date without the risk of running into WGA and/or activation. So while machines sold with legitimate windows strongly encourage (in the first run setup) users to turn on automatic updates machines sold with pirate windows (which probablly won't bother with the first run setup) are likely to have them disabled.

Funny you should mention that, as for shits and giggles I decided to run my own little test, since I was bored and a gamer customer handed me a pair of discs, one is called "Windows Ultra DVD eXperience" which has the in order of memory requirements micro/tiny/full/loaded versions of Win2K/XP/2K3 and along with that the Tiny Vista disc and the Tiny7 disc which I already had. Now since Micro is IMHO TOO stripped, as in many programs won't run as well as many drivers, I stuck with Tiny for my tests...here are

Is it also any wonder why so much high-profile hacking originates from inside China? (undoubtedly a lot of it does come from Chinese efforts, but anybody that's interested in hacking high-profile targets can just route themselves through China, too)

That's kind of funny in comparison to my little corner of the US. On a gardening site I run (so non-techie) I'm currently seeing IE with a 42% market share total. This is down from 51% a year ago, and somewhere around 65% the year before that.

The key difference is that most computers in the west have a valid Windows license, but most computers in China have a pirate one. Pirate copies can't install later versions of IE.

Back when I used to fix PCs I noticed that a lot of Chinese students used pre-cracked install CDs which disabled automatic updates. If you keep installing new hacks you can get the updates, but for non-technical people that isn't really an option.

I guess the chinese haven't discovered volume-licensed versions of Windows. I got my current XP media from the last school I attended, and it's VLK'd so I never have to activate, though I do still have to deal with WGA... but that works fine.

"...about the size of two football fields, or your average restraining order". -- Adam Savage

Why always comparing numbers to the size or anything else? In all media there is always the "it's about the size of..." quote that always seems it does not mean anything related to the subject discussed.

Those users are useless as far as users/views go to anyone but the Chinese government and websites inside China. If Microsoft thinks they can benefit by grovelling and playing nice they'll just get their Google-chasing asses kicked harder later.

Yeah, but it is a botnet on the wrong side of the Great Firewall - unless your goal is to take down some server in China. Plus, chances are the Chinese government already has half of those PCs in its own Botnets, and they might not take kindly to anybody borrowing their CPU resources. It isn't like you can send spam, since 80% of all the mail servers already block traffic from China.

As long as you have a noscript version of the site, you're fine. IE still renders plain HTML properly (well, some idiosyncracies with how it handles margins and css divs, but nothing the average user would ever notice). The problem is when you want to start adding fancy JavaScript, AJAX, or other Web 2.0 bling that IE 6 starts to gak. Present IE6 users with a one-time (per session) warning at the top advising them that they really should upgrade to something like Firefox or Chrome (or even a more recent ver

In countries with a lower average income, the lifetime of computers is significantly longer. And the chinese i worked with usually have an extreme habit of "never touch a running system". And they dont declare a possible virus infection to be a problem.

During the 4 short months I was in China, most of the computers I saw were old and running XP. It is no wonder they use IE6. Yes. I believe the statistics from having witnessed it.
However, most people visit Chinese sites.
Those people in China that surf to western sites and purchase western products on them most likely have better/newer computers running pirated versions of Windows 7.
My conclusion is the IE6 users in China are NOT potential customers and therefore irrelevant. So I refuse to develop IE6

That might be a mistake depending on your site. Here in North America or even Europe I would ignore IE 6 unless it is a very corporate site. Chinese do buy things online and ActiveX is required there and so are crippled computers with pirates operating systems that Windows Update can't upgrade to IE 8 easily. I know webmasters want to burn all copies of IE 6, but China is different and IE 8 can run in compatibilty mode so coding once for ActiveX and IE 6 is viable. Everyone else does it so it is standard as

Still horrendous that many of the UK gvmt are still on IE6, usually as they have so many stupid apps written that break if up don't use IE6. yes IE7 or 8 break the apps as well cos the devs used so many IE6 specifics.

Yup, my workplace is IE6. Didn't really cause problems until maybe a year ago when they started rolling out very Javascript-heavy websites all over the place. So, I use Chrome as much as I can (doesn't cause conflicts and navigates everything quickly), and then when I get to a URL that won't work without ActiveX I copy/paste it into IE6 and go take a bathroom break while the page loads. In IE6 the workflow is more like click link, go grab a cup of water, click link, go type up a document, click link, and

Just a thought, but isn't this because China mainly uses the Maxthon browser, which uses IE6 as its engine (or at least used to, for a looong time)? They built a browser on top of IE6 that has tabs and other modern things, so the user experience isn't as completely shit as plain old IE6.

Well, Maxthon claims to have had 500,000,000 downloads [maxthon.com] by 2010. Sounds about right, don't you think? I don't have anecdotal evidence to back my claim, but I asked because I remember reading that Maxthon is one of the biggest browsers in China a few years back, and I know it is/was based on IE6.

I have lived in P.R. China since 2006 and I do not recall ever coming across this browser on anyone's machines or in any internet cafes. I am not saying that no one uses it. However, the only browser I ever see anyone using is the Chinese language version of IE.

All the damned Security digital video recorders still use fricking Active X for their web control. Every single one of those things are complete crap because that are all China made and they don't put any effort into making the interface work with any browser.

XP may be officially "unsupported" in 2014, but China, and corporate users in other countries will keep it going for decades to come. Too bad Ubuntu/Gnome didn't "get the hint" and create a usable interface like XP instead of Unity/Gnome-Shell or they could of got some of the market share. IE6/XP is this centuries' COBOL.

Those who subscribe to the "it works, don't change it" mantra won't ever change unless they absolutely have to. And if they do have to change, they choose the smallest possible change which would be a Windows upgrade. The massively conservative won't switch until almost everybody else does, it's pointless to look to them for early adopters.

"The massively conservative won't switch until almost everybody else does, it's pointless to look to them for early adopters.

"

The issue is the massively conservative are becoming the new moderate majority. I am quite shocked to read all the pro Windows XP posts here on slashdot. Slashdot users are the ones who *should* welcome change more and experiment before the average users. If half the users here prefer Firefox 3.6 and Windows XP then these tech giants and I.T. consultants are in trouble.

It is the equilivent of turning down Windows XP for Windows 3.0 when it was new. That would have been ludcrious. Today, this is common sense and mainstream. Is it the recession?

No IMO it's a sign of maturity.

In the decade leading up to 2K we got plug and play (which made it much easier for users to add hardware), USB (which relied on plug and play), a proper kernel (with premptive multitasking memory protection and security), the taskbar which made it easy to see what was running and switch between them. 2K was where all these important features came together in a single release. XP was a minor update to 2K which added a crippled version for home users and a few other bits and pei

Yes, 2K is almost as good as Solaris from five years earlier - only without the stability, 64 bit capability and with a GUI interface that is a step backwards even from the fairly crappy CDE. Home computers really did mean settling for second best, especially when Microsoft let people address all the memory the pentium II could use in their 32 bit server OS while the 32 bit home version wasn't compatible with the pentium II all the way to Vista and wouldn't even let you use 4GB. They even had the gall to

While it is annoying that you can't get 32-bit windows to do proper PAE and support more than 3GB of RAM. It probably was for the best really, otherwise we never would've gotten the momentum behind x64 Windows to get x64 compatible device drivers from the damn manufacturers.

I thought it was mostly Windows XP without some SP's with also do not support activation and thus have no IE7 or IE8.

Retail and system builder (small OEM) copies of XP require activation

volume license versions of XP don't require activation

Big brand OEM versions of XP don't require activation if appropriate BIOS keys are present but will demand activation if those BIOS keys are not present.

All of the above applies regardless of service pack. What did change in XP's lifecycle was that MS introduced key blacklisting and WGA to try and root out those that were using volume license versions with leaked or generated keys. The

I'd say it's easier to pirate than activate a legal copy of XP these days. Last time I activated it required feeding the freshly installed machine IE8 and a service pack from a USB stick - because it wouldn't activate without IE8 and wouldn't let me download IE8 without activation.

do you click on the "feedback button" and tell them every month that their website is broken because it does not work with Firefox or Chrome. If you don't they assume you absolutely love that it only works with IE...

Perhaps that used to be the case. After reading your comment I tried paying my bill in Firefox 4 and it worked just fine. FF isn't my usual browser, so I can't say if this is a recent fix on T-Mobile's site.

Web browsing isn't really a concern since it gets along fine with NAT. The applications that need to be concerned about IPv4 exhaustion are those that rely on accepting incoming connections from the internet on domestic connections (primerally P2P networks).